Menachem Elimelech

Elimelech has been named to Goizueta Chair

Menachem Elimelech, the newly designated Roberto C. Goizueta Professor of Chemical Engineering, is a specialist in the physiochemical processes in natural water and in engineered aquatic systems.

He is director of the Environmental Engineering Program, which emphasizes a multidisciplinary approach to solving environmental problems. His research focuses on three areas: transport and fate of microbial pathogens in aquatic environments; fundamentals and applications of membrane separation processes for water quality control; and dynamics of colloidal particles and biocolloids in aquatic systems. The work is supported by, among others, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the National Water Research Institute, the Office of Naval Research and the U.S. Department of the Interior.

A native of Israel, Elimelech was a captain in the Israeli Air Force before earning his B.S. and M.Sc. at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem (1983 and 1985) and his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University (1989). He taught 1989-1998 at the University of California at Los Angeles, where he was a professor and vice chair in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering before coming to Yale as the Llewellyn West Jones Professor of Environmental Engineering.

Elimelech has written over 90 articles and is principal author of the book "Particle Deposition and Aggregation" (1995).

He has held visiting posts at the California Institute of Technology, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the Kwangju Institute of Science and Technology in Korea. In summer of 2002, Elimelech was the Exxon-Mobil Chair Professor at the National University of Singapore.

His numerous honors include the W.M. Keck Foundation Engineering Teaching Excellence Award, the Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Outstanding Paper Award of the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professsors and the Excellence in Review Award of the journal Environmental Science & Technology. In May he received Yale's Graduate Mentor Award.

Elimelech serves on the editorial advisory boards of Colloids and Surfaces A, Desalination, Environmental Science & Technology, Environmental Engineering Science and Separation Science and Technology.